Newsweek Touts Eva Moskowitz: “Yes, Wall Street Helps the Poor”

By RP Staff, on Wed Oct 26, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET

While the “Occupy Wall Street” movement gains some steam, some critics are pointing to some of the philanthropy taking place among the masters of the universe. In the following article, Newsweek profiles the work contributing RP Eva Moskowitz is doing to improve education for poor, urban youth in New York City and her support on Wall Street:

It was a scene to curdle liberal blood. A ballroom full of New York hedge-fund managers playing poker … to raise money for charter schools.

That’s where I found myself last Wednesday: at a Texas Hold ’Em tournament to raise money for the Success Charter Network, which currently runs nine schools in some of New York’s poorest neighborhoods.

While Naomi Wolf was being arrested for showing solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, there I was, consorting with the 1 percent the protesters hate. It’s no surprise that the bread-heads enjoy gambling. But to see them using their ill-gotten gains to subvert this nation’s great system of public education! I was shocked, shocked…

Your ZIP code can be your destiny, because poor neighborhoods tend to have bad schools, and bad schools perpetuate poverty. But the answer is not to increase spending on this failed system—nor to expand it at the kindergarten level, as proposed by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times last week. As brave reformers like Eva Moskowitz know, the stranglehold exerted by the teachers’ unions makes it almost impossible to raise the quality of education in subprime public schools.

The right answer is to promote the kind of diversity and competition that already make the American university system the world’s best. And one highly effective way of doing this is by setting up more charter schools—publicly funded but independently run and union-free. The performance of the Success Charter Network speaks for itself. In New York City’s public schools, 60 percent of third, fourth, and fifth graders passed their math exams last year. The figure at Harlem Success was 94 percent.